Only one track left to pre-master, which I’m hoping I’ll get done tonight (despite the boiler breaking last night and therefore my hands will probably freeze off mid-session…)

Should be ready to pass on to the IDMf netlabel in a couple of weeks. I’m getting quite excited about this – if you want a preview of a few tracks this week then just follow me on Soundcloud where I’ll upload some of the unmastered versions for a limited time (tracks below are all at work-in-progress stages; obviously I’ve finished them now…)

Well, I really didn’t expect the player to pop up when I entered the URL of my page. Soundcloud is even more clever than I thought:

If I’m going to write about the stuff I use for making music, I might as well list what I do use so anyone reading this will get an idea of what to expect in future. It’s not like I’m going to write posts about stuff I don’t use myself; that would be stupid. So here goes, hardware first:

3. DSP Quattro (just bought this a few days ago, will probably write about this a lot as I get used to using it),

4. Several AU plugins (I’ll not list them all, but faves are probably Madrona Labs’ Aalto, FXpansion’s Synth Squad, NI’s Reaktor, Massive and Absynth, and for FX I’m a sucker for tape saturation and nice reverbs. Not to mention the more experimental FX like Sugar Bytes’ Effectrix and Audio Damage’s Replicant and Ronin, and everything by Sinevibes).

5. Metasynth 5. The daddy of sound design apps (unless you can afford Kyma….one day, perhaps…. Hey, I can dream.)

Right, I’m done writing this for the moment. Time to polish up a few more album tracks and put them to bed. Challenge to myself – I’ll post a previously unheard track to Soundcloud (and here) before the end of the night…

I’m going to be writing about producing music and other generally pretty geeky things, so it’s probably a good idea to make sure I can get the stuff I want to use working before I get going. Here’s a track off my forthcoming album to test the Soundcloud player for starters: